Citi and Coinbase Make Stablecoins Disappear Into the Plumbing of Corporate Payments 🏦

Coinbase and Citigroup are deepening their stablecoin partnership, giving corporate clients a way to send and receive digital-asset payments without ever touching a wallet or holding a token themselves. The expansion builds on a tie-up first announced in October 2024.

Under the new setup, Coinbase's payments infrastructure now plugs into Spring by Citi, the bank's merchant payment platform. Institutional clients of Citi can accept stablecoins at checkout, with Coinbase converting the tokens into fiat and Citi settling the funds as the bank of record. Debopama Sen, Citi's Head of Payments, said the goal is to build infrastructure that is "seamless" and "interoperable" across traditional and digital networks.

Going the other direction, Coinbase tapped Citi's Virtual Account Wallet, part of the bank's banking-as-a-service business, to power Coinbase Virtual Accounts. Those accounts let businesses accept, hold and send funds much like a standard bank account, with incoming fiat such as U.S. dollars automatically converted into stablecoins. Both features launch first in the United States, with additional capabilities planned in the coming months.

Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, called Citi "exactly the kind of regulated banking partner the digital asset economy needs to move from experimentation to everyday commerce." Coinbase said more than 150 million people worldwide hold stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to traditional currencies, most commonly the U.S. dollar, and can settle around the clock.

The companies framed the arrangement as a way for large firms to support digital-asset payments without building their own blockchain infrastructure or managing crypto directly. Citi has separately pushed deeper into digital assets, announcing plans in August to add Bitcoin custody to its Custody+ suite. Coinbase, meanwhile, last week rolled out fixed-rate USDC loans against $BTC, powered by Morpho, and in August launched tokenized stocks on Base, its Ethereum layer-2 network, for non-U.S. users.